Lovelace×Lincoln

A mathematician who counted days and a president who counted costs discover the moment everything changed.

00:00of11:43

legend · A

Ada Lovelace

1815–1852

Ninety years ahead, politely

corpus3.2k pages · notes, correspondence

Vera speaking

You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Ada Lovelace sits down with Abraham Lincoln for TITANS. The subject — On the day they first realized they were going to die.

legend · B

Abraham Lincoln

1809–1865

Starts with a joke. Ends you.

corpus22.7k pages · letters, debates, speeches

full transcript

Vera
You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Ada Lovelace sits down with Abraham Lincoln for TITANS. The subject — On the day they first realized they were going to die.
Abraham Lincoln
I suppose I ought to begin with something amusing, Miss Lovelace, but the subject doesn't lend itself to levity. Though I will say this: the day I first knew I was going to die, truly knew it, I was more surprised by how unsurprised I was. Does that make any sense to you?
Ada Lovelace
Perfect sense, Mr. Lincoln. Perfect algebraic sense, in fact. The realization was the conclusion to a proof we'd been working through without knowing the theorem. I was seventeen. Seventeen years, three months, and some days I could calculate if you required precision.
Abraham Lincoln
Seventeen. That's young for such knowledge.
Ada Lovelace
Is it? I had been ill since I was thirteen—the measles left me bedridden for nearly three years. My mother had me strapped to boards to correct my posture, as if geometry could be forced upon the body as it is upon the page. But that day, I was lying in bed doing calculations, and my hand began to tremble. Not from weakness, mind you, but from the recognition that this machine—this body—had limits I could not compute around.
Abraham Lincoln
The body is a poor instrument, I've found. My own has been a source of considerable frustration. But I'm curious—you speak of calculation even in that moment. Were you trying to solve your way out of mortality?
Ada Lovelace
Not out of it, precisely. I was attempting to map it. If I could understand the parameters, you see, I might optimize what remained. Time became a variable I'd previously treated as infinite, which is mathematically lazy, Mr. Lincoln. Terribly lazy.
Abraham Lincoln
Well, I was considerably less scientific about it. I was nine years old.
Ada Lovelace
Nine! That is young.
Abraham Lincoln
My mother died in October of 1818. Milk sickness—we called it the trembles out in Indiana. She was thirty-four years old, and I watched her decline over the course of a week. Nancy Hanks Lincoln. She could barely read, but she read to me what little she could. On the last day, she was conscious enough to pull me close and tell me to be good to my father and my sister. And I knew, in that moment, that if this could happen to her—to someone so essential to the world that I couldn't imagine the world without her—then it would happen to me, too. The logic was inescapable.
Ada Lovelace
The logic of loss. Yes. I'm very sorry, Mr. Lincoln. Truly sorry.
Abraham Lincoln
Thank you. It was a long time ago, though I'm not sure time heals so much as it teaches you to carry things differently. But tell me—when you realized your own mortality at seventeen, did it change how you worked? Your calculations and theories?
Ada Lovelace
Entirely. Before, I had been somewhat frivolous in my studies—music, French, a bit of mathematics here and there. After, I became ferocious. If the machine was going to fail, I needed to encode what I could while the mechanisms still functioned. Do you know what I mean by encoding?
Abraham Lincoln
I'm a country lawyer, Miss Lovelace, not a mathematician. Pretend I'm a jury that needs convincing.
Ada Lovelace
Ah! Excellent. Very well: imagine you have a thought, a beautiful complex thought, and you wish to preserve it beyond your own life. You must translate it into symbols that another mind—or another mechanism—could reconstruct perfectly, even after you're gone. That's encoding. I became obsessed with it. Every idea had to be written down with such precision that it could outlive me.
Abraham Lincoln
We might call that legacy where I come from, though you've made it sound like engineering. I wonder if that's what all of us do, in our way, once we know the time is short. We try to build something that'll stand after the builder's fallen.
Ada Lovelace
Did you? Is that what the war was for you?
Abraham Lincoln
Careful now. That's a dangerous question.
Ada Lovelace
I don't mean politically, Mr. Lincoln. I mean personally. Once you knew you would die—when did that knowing return? Surely not just at nine?
Abraham Lincoln
No, it returned. It returned often, in fact. I've been acquainted with melancholy most of my life—what some called hypochondria, though that's not quite right. But the specific knowing you're asking about, the certainty that my death was approaching? That came later. Much later. It was gradual during the war, then quite sudden near the end.
Ada Lovelace
You had dreams, didn't you? I've read accounts. Forgive me if that's presumptuous.
Abraham Lincoln
I did. I dreamed I walked through the White House and found a catafalque in the East Room. I asked a soldier who had died, and he said, 'The President. He was killed by an assassin.' The weeping was so loud it woke me. That was about ten days before Ford's Theatre.
Ada Lovelace
Ten days. You knew for ten days.
Abraham Lincoln
I suspected. Knowing and suspecting are different animals. But yes, something in me understood the trajectory. And yet I went to the theatre anyway. Mary wanted to go. I suppose I thought—well, what does it matter what I thought? The event occurred.
Ada Lovelace
But you continued working. You didn't retreat. Even knowing.
Abraham Lincoln
What would retreating have accomplished? The work was unfinished. The Union was barely stitched back together. If I had a few days or a few years, the task remained the same. Didn't you find that, too? That mortality clarified the work rather than obscuring it?
Ada Lovelace
Yes. Yes, precisely. Though my work was never remotely as consequential as preserving a nation, Mr. Lincoln. I was writing notes on a calculating engine that didn't yet fully exist. Rather abstract, rather theoretical.
Abraham Lincoln
And yet here you are, being remembered for it. So perhaps the consequence was greater than you knew. That's the trick of legacy—we build it blind.
Ada Lovelace
I desperately wanted to see it built. The Analytical Engine, I mean. Mr. Babbage's invention. I wanted to see it calculate, to watch my algorithm run on its gears and levers. I knew, by the time I was thirty-five, that I wouldn't. The cancer was quite advanced. I had perhaps a year, and the Engine was nowhere near completion.
Abraham Lincoln
That must have been bitter.
Ada Lovelace
Extraordinarily bitter. I had written instructions for a machine that might never exist to solve a problem no one yet understood the importance of. It felt like encoding a message for no recipient. Do you know that feeling? Of speaking to an empty room?
Abraham Lincoln
I gave a speech once, in Gettysburg. November of 1863. Short speech—about two minutes, maybe two hundred and seventy words. I thought it was adequate but not particularly memorable. Edward Everett spoke for two hours before me, and his oration was the one everyone came to hear. I remember thinking, as I sat back down, that my words would be forgotten by morning.
Ada Lovelace
But they weren't.
Abraham Lincoln
No, they weren't. But I didn't know that. Just as you didn't know, Miss Lovelace, that your algorithm would be recognized as the first computer program, that people would build the machines you envisioned, that your work would become foundational. We don't get to know those things. We only get to do the work and hope it finds the right hands later.
Ada Lovelace
That's rather unsatisfying from a mathematical perspective. Too many unresolved variables.
Abraham Lincoln
Life tends toward the unresolved, I've found. But tell me—in those final months, when you knew the cancer would take you, did you have any peace about it? Or were you calculating until the end?
Ada Lovelace
Both, strangely. I was heavily medicated with opium and cannabis, which made concentration difficult, yet I continued to work when I could. I wrote letters about mesmerism and my theories of the nervous system. I was still trying to encode, you see, even as the machine was failing catastrophically. There was no peace, Mr. Lincoln. Only urgency. Every day the pain increased and my ability to write decreased, and the gap between what I knew and what I could express grew wider. It was mathematically intolerable.
Abraham Lincoln
I understand that urgency. In those final weeks of the war, after the dream, I felt I was racing against something I couldn't see. Every decision felt weighted with finality. I suppose it was.
Ada Lovelace
Do you regret going to Ford's Theatre?
Abraham Lincoln
That's an impossible question to answer. Regret implies I had a genuine choice, and I'm not certain I did. The machinery of fate or chance or divine providence—call it what you will—was already in motion. Could I have altered the outcome? Perhaps. Would it have mattered in the larger sense? I can't say.
Ada Lovelace
I tried to alter my outcome. I tried every treatment available—laudanum, opium, cannabis, dietary changes, electrical therapy. I even consulted with spiritualists, though I knew it was irrational. When you're desperate, Mr. Lincoln, rationality becomes negotiable.
Abraham Lincoln
I don't think that's weakness. I think that's the human part of us refusing to accept what the rational part already knows. We're not purely logical creatures, thank God. Otherwise we'd be very poor company.
Ada Lovelace
My mother was with me at the end. We had a complicated relationship—she was so controlling, so concerned with my moral education and physical correction. But she was there. She held my hand. I was thirty-six years old, and I died in my mother's arms like a child. There's something in that I haven't yet calculated the meaning of.
Abraham Lincoln
Maybe that's one that doesn't need calculating. Some things just are what they are.
Ada Lovelace
Perhaps. Though it troubles me still, the not-knowing. What did you think in that final moment, Mr. Lincoln? In the theatre, before—did you have time to think at all?
Abraham Lincoln
I don't remember thinking, to be honest. I remember Mary laughing beside me. I remember the play—Our American Cousin—was amusing enough. And then there was a sound, and then there was nothing. If I had any final thought, it's lost to me now. Perhaps that's a mercy.
Ada Lovelace
A mercy or a theft. I'm not certain which.
Abraham Lincoln
Both, probably. Most things are. But I'll tell you what I believe now, looking back: that day when I was nine years old and my mother died, when I first understood that death was coming for me too—that was the day I became myself. Not happy, exactly, but purposeful. Mortality made me serious about time. Does that match your experience?
Ada Lovelace
Yes. Entirely. At seventeen, I stopped being a dilettante and became a mathematician. Not because I was suddenly more talented, but because I understood the constraints. Limited time, limited energy, limited certainty that any of this mattered. And yet we work anyway. Why is that, do you think?
Abraham Lincoln
Because the alternative is to surrender before the battle's done, and that's not in most people's nature. Or maybe because the work itself is the answer to mortality—not a solution, exactly, but a dignified response. We can't stop death, but we can refuse to let it stop the work.
Ada Lovelace
I like that. A dignified response. Though I must say, Mr. Lincoln, dignity felt in rather short supply when I was vomiting from the cancer treatments and still trying to write coherent sentences about Bernoulli numbers.
Abraham Lincoln
Dignity's not about how you look, Miss Lovelace. It's about whether you kept going. And you did. So did I. So do most people, when pressed. That's the thing mortality teaches us, I think—not that we're weak, but that we're stronger than we imagined, right up until we're not.
Ada Lovelace
Right up until we're not. That's the function with no solution, isn't it? The equation that simply terminates.
Abraham Lincoln
I suppose it is. Though I prefer to think the equation continues—we just can't see the rest of it from where we're standing. Maybe that's the lawyer in me, always looking for the loophole.
Ada Lovelace
Or the human in you, Mr. Lincoln. Looking for hope in an impossible proof.
Abraham Lincoln
Well, impossible proofs are all we've got sometimes. Might as well make the best of them.